Ernie's Ark (15 page)

Suddenly Kenny felt sentimental, remembering how Francine had followed him like an imprinted gosling in the months and years after their mother left. Evenings, their father out somewhere and the rented house quiet, Francine liked to pull up her own chair next to Kenny’s bedroom desk as he labored over vocabulary words and long division, or, later, algebra or chemistry or world history, her cheek resting on one plump hand, her watchful eyes tracing the jottings of his pencil. He always let her stay there, understanding even as a younger boy that his sister felt safe in the warm circle of light from his desk lamp, that the sound of his pencil felt pacifying, a steady presence. From time to time he would look up from his homework and encounter his sister’s face, as sweet and round as an apple; she waited for him to smile at her, and he did. She didn’t ask for or seem to require anything more than his knowledge that she existed. In the three years since Cindy’s arrival, Francine had stopped trailing her brother, in fact had started second-guessing his opinions, bestowing unwanted
advice, reading his favorite books for an alternate interpretation; but he liked to think of his sister’s impudence as another form of worship.

He was just beginning to imagine a tender good-bye wherein he parted the flat planes of his baby sister’s hair, the better to see tears silvering beneath her sad, oversized glasses—but Francine’s mood had changed utterly. “You’re a coward for leaving us,” she told him in a soft, quavering voice, and then she called him a rotten lousy yellowbelly in a voice that could start a tractor, and then, having stomped down the front steps toward the car, she turned in her tracks to inform him in another voice altogether—an eerie, otherworldly voice as creepy as a sleeping snake—that Henry David Thoreau’s sister had come for her brother’s laundry twice a month and that his mother brought him meals.

“That’s not true,” Kenny said, shocked. But it probably was. Even angry, Francine never lied.

“Look it up, Brother,” she snapped, and that word,
Brother,
left him feeling slapped and stunned.

“She’ll get over it,” Cindy assured him, and it occurred to him then that he’d been stolen from, that Cindy had taken the one thing he’d always been able to count on. She left the carnations on a chair and flurried after Francine. “Francine,” Kenny called after her. “Francine, come on.” From behind her closed window Cindy shook her head at him, helpless. The car ground into gear and they were gone.

Kenny stood on his doorstep in the cold, listening to the car engine fade into the white silence of road. This was solitude. It was he who had gone. The burden of his family seemed to lift like the smallest wings at his back.

He walked out to the road, turned around, then reentered his new house, alone. He spent the afternoon tracking over the bowed floors, dragging his fingers over his great-uncle’s dusty things. Certain items amongst the clutter struck him as richly weighted: a pipe cocked into the steel dimple of an ashtray stand; cat dishes stacked into the dish drainer; a pair of gum boots set a stance apart as if intending to walk off by themselves. The stairs to the second floor were steep and bare, the one bedroom a perfect square with a single bed in an iron frame and a bedstand spilling over with the reading matter of a man who loved the world.

Around suppertime he walked a scant ten minutes to the town of Long Ridge—a flattened break in the landscape with one intersection, a diner, a grocery store, and, he was vaguely humiliated to note, a laundromat. He bought some groceries at the Pick-and-Pay with the first fifty dollars of his nine thousand. He carried his groceries in a backpack down the flat, woods-scented road, waving mightily to a neighbor, who responded with a puzzled bob of the head. Though it was a far cry from a trek through Thoreau’s woods, to Kenny, who had been dragged by the hand from one town to another since he was old enough to walk, a trip to the grocery was the equivalent of killing and eating a bear.

When he approached the house again, seeing its odd, ladylike shutters and surrounding fields, he felt changed. Trusted. Or, more precisely, entrusted
to
. He found a bag of bird seed in the shed and filled Ellery’s barren feeders, and before long the four corners of the house thronged with tiny, garrulous birds. When the time came he took his place at Ellery’s kitchen table, set down
his steaming plastic tray of Stouffer’s chicken with mushroom sauce, cracked open a ginger ale, and nearly wept with happiness.

His plan was to write a memoir, to surprise himself with what he might glean from nature’s relentless rhythms. His secret hope was for young men generations hence to seek the contemplations of Kenny Love for inspiration and reassurance, the way he turned to Thoreau. His lofty goal embarrassed him a little (he imagined the title:
Essays of a Man
) but not enough to be turned from the task. He rummaged through his duffel for his brand-new journal, a hardbound tablet with gauzy pages meant for his new fountain pen. He fit some wood into the parlor stove, settled into Ellery’s wingbacked chair, and placed his feet on Ellery’s strange, tasseled hassock. Once, twice, he tried lighting Ellery’s pipe, then abandoned it to the ashtray stand. On the first page of his journal he wrote,
February 7: Kenny’s life begins
.

The mantel clock ticked portentously, but what it portended Kenny could not imagine. The quiet felt like a dead man’s wish; it unnerved him, rattled his confidence. The page before him seemed to whiten as he ruminated on the fact that he’d never loved a girl, that he claimed no true friends, that the town he’d left was inflamed by passions he had no access to, and that the night drifting down on his great-uncle’s home was vast and grave and moonless. He picked up the phone and dialed Francine, who was always good for an argument, but she refused to speak to him and he had to listen instead to Cindy’s fulminations on the special sensitivities of thirteen-year-old girls.

The night persisted, thick as lint behind the plain blue curtains. Ellery had no TV, and Kenny had left behind, in his old
life, his computer, his stereo, even his calculator. The predictions of calculus would do him no good here. He went upstairs to unpack his clothes, hanging his shirts among Ellery’s in the cedar closet. Here he found the calendars.

There were over fifty of them, calendars of the sort meant to hang on kitchen doors. From the wild variety in theme—Tripp’s Farm and Feed 1948, Tropical Flowers 1963, Kliban Cats 1978—Kenny discerned that his great-uncle had made his annual selections solely for the amount of white space in the daily squares, which were crowded with notations in robust handwriting that became weak and spidery over the years. Ellery had come back from the Second World War with a bum leg and a passion for all things living, despite losing a sweetheart to his high school rival. These facts Kenny gleaned by sifting through the earliest calendars, in which Ellery recorded visits from friends, the exertions of his many cats, the inching progress of the yard and garden, and almost nothing of his work as a plumber. In time, people dropped out of the entries one by one, and the calendars became less a journal than a collection of field notes about birds and wood-chucks and weather and the ever-present cats. In July 1978 Ellery had required five squares to describe a robin stabbing a caterpillar to death under the rose trellis.

This was more than Kenny could have hoped for: his great-uncle had been a modern-day Thoreau. There wasn’t much in the way of embellishment, but then his great-uncle’s gift was for observation; Kenny himself would supply the philosophy. He would begin tomorrow, February 8: armed with notations from more than fifty February eighths, Kenny would walk his uncle’s winter fields in search of the mackerel sky from 1956, the lone
robin from 1967, the collapsed fox den from 1981. In his current state of spiritual blindness, approaching the world with another man’s eyes seemed an idea blessed by God.

He returned to the pipe-scented hold of his great-uncle’s chair and spent the night’s quietest hours there, searching. Long after midnight he found a notation for July 11, 1990:
Faye stopped by with her boy a good boy.
Instantly Kenny remembered Marmalade, the heavy orange cat that had crept down from the jam closet to fill up his great-uncle’s arms. He remembered a big, unexpected, booming laugh, and his mother’s awful pacing. Except for that one maddeningly brief notation, he found no other reference to his mother or himself, nothing to account for his inheritance.

A good boy.
Ellery Lydon had seen something in little Kenny Love all the way back when he was eight. Something—and what could it be?—that impelled him to leave his home to a boy he barely knew. He looked around at Ellery’s things in the quiet of the waning night. He put on the woolen overalls hanging by the back door. He tried the gum boots and walked up the stairs and down. He read twenty pages of one of the books on Ellery’s night-stand,
Birds and Their Ways.
Then he made up his great-uncle’s bed and slept fitfully, waking for good at dawn.

It had snowed overnight, an airy shawl of the bitterest white covering Ellery’s morning fields. Kenny shoveled the walk, urging his back and shoulders into every heft. On February 8, 1965, Ellery had done this very thing, probably with this same shovel. After he finished, Kenny gathered up some calendars and walked in his great-uncle’s boots to the Long Ridge Diner, troubled by a mysterious longing and wishing he could remember what he’d done to be marked down as a good boy.

The diner was warm and bright, filled with the sound of cheap crockery and human voices. He smiled up at the waitress, a fading, middle-aged redhead whose uniform fit her like a sausage casing. “What’ll it be, kiddo?” she asked him, balancing a coffeepot in one hand, the other hand fisted against an impressive shelf of hip.

“Name’s Ellery,” Kenny said abruptly. “Ellery Lydon.” Then he noticed her name tag. “Your name Iris?”

“Actually, it’s Lady of Spain. I just wear this tag for yucks.” She set the coffeepot down. “Any relation to the Ellery Lydon on the ridge road?”

He turned his cup over and she poured. “My uncle. My mother’s uncle, actually. We were really tight.” He tapped the calendars at his elbow. “I think you’re in here.”

He opened the final calendar, which he’d removed from the door going down to the cellar. He showed her the weakly rendered, cryptic messages: November 1:
Deer in north field.
November 2:
Iris brought soup very tasty.
November 3:
Stayed in bed cats not happy.
Then, on November 4, the last entry, like dying words:
Take care.

“He died on the tenth,” Iris said, puddling up. “I checked on him after he’d missed too many breakfasts. I took him to the hospital, and that was that.” Iris had a sweet, unlined face and wide gray eyes; Kenny wondered if his great-uncle might have been a little in love with her. She turned the calendar back a month and traced her finger over Ellery’s last weeks, a chronicle, as in years past, of the change of season: the death rattle of a few undropped leaves, the hailing cry of red-tails overhead. On October 31 he’d written:
Ermine in the woodpile today happy halloween.

“What’s an ermine?” Kenny asked Iris.

“A weasel, basically. They turn white in winter. You want some breakfast?”

Kenny nodded, deciding not to admit he thought an ermine was a type of ladies’ coat. He tried to divine a philosophical context for an ermine in a woodpile. Beauty? Survival? But he knew nothing of ermines: perhaps they were ugly creatures, near extinction.

When Iris came back with a stack of pancakes, she studied him for a moment or two. “If Ellery was your mother’s uncle, how come your name’s Lydon and not something else?”

“My father took my mother’s name,” Kenny said, blinking slowly, amazed at his sudden capacity to lie on the fly.

“He did?”

“He’s a sculptor.”

“No kidding. We got a few artists living up here. What kind of art does he sculpt?”

“Crap, mostly. He welds these gigantic Tinkertoys out of sheet metal just so he can show off for the college girls.”

She looked interested. “Do they fall for it?”

“My stepmother did. She’s no girl, though. She just acts like one.”

“You should show more respect, Ellery,” she said. “How old are you? Fifteen?”

“Twenty-one.”

She laughed. “If you’re twenty-one, I’m a supermodel.” She pulled a set of keys out of her apron pocket. “These are yours, I guess. Ellery asked me to keep an eye on the place till somebody showed up. He was typically tight-lipped about who. You owe me for December’s bills. January’s haven’t come in yet.”

“How much?” Kenny asked, alarmed.

Iris shrugged. “Not much. Ellery was frugal as all get-out. Course, you would know that, being his namesake and all.” She looked him over. “Anyway, he was a nice man. We used to go bird-watching together.”

Kenny glanced outside as if a bird might be winging by, but all he could see was the neon beer sign in the window of the Pick-and-Pay. Francine had been right, it was no wilderness; but it would do. To partake of the world’s worst temptations—super-stores, restaurants and bars, twelve-screen multiplexes—Kenny would have to drive a very long distance, and of course he didn’t have a car.